Healthcare

Berrywood Hospital is a purpose-built facility that helps individuals re-build their lives in a safe and caring environment. The hospital provides state-of-the-art facilities for inpatient mental health services for adults and older people, an assessment and treatment unit for people with learning disabilities and a low secure unit.

The team have published a paper that outlines positve feedback from using body cameras in an inpatient setting.

Feedback from the study

“I think it prevents lots of aggression and puts patients’ minds at ease knowing there is a record of what happened.”

“I have seen a few occasions where the incident had deescalated and believe this to have been helped by the camera being turned on.”

“I am fully in support of the technology being used permanently in the future."

"I can see nothing but positives from it with recourse to its potential in reducing/ deescalating violent incidents.”

“Initially sceptical, however can see that body worn cameras have had a positive impact on both patients and staff.”

The study reported that in the course of its focus groups, examples were given by staff where they felt the use of BWCs may have changed behaviour such as when a female patient kicking a door stopped when was told she was being filmed or a gentleman who had a habit of hitting staff stopped when the cameras were on.

Patients themselves described what they considered were the benefits of staff wearing BWCs which included: "better treatment for patients, respectfor staff, accurate recording andclarifying situations in the face ofpossible unjust accusations."

The study also found that the level of violent incidents and instances of use of emergency restraints reduced on three of the wards as compared to thesame time last year. There were also no complaints regarding restraints during the pilot period of BWCs compared to two, in the same period a year earlier.

Dr. Alex O’Neill-Kerr – Clinical Medical Director, Northamptonshire Healthcare NHS Foundation Trust said “Improving patient and staff safety, coupled with improving the quality of care afforded are key priorities for us and we are always striving to find innovative ways to achieve those objectives. As this study has proven, body worn cameras could play an integral role in accomplishing those goals.”

One year on at Northamptonshire Healthcare NHS Foundation Trust

In the last year the team at Berrywood have rolled out Calla body cameras to an entire ward to see the difference every nurse wearing a camera makes.

Andres Patino, head of mental health services, said this was to test the impact of the technology even further. “When it came to phase two what we wanted to do was to test it even further so that every member of staff on one ward wore the camera at all times, compared to those areas where only one person was wearing it.”